One of the strongest potential growth areas for telecommunications/information technology service providers today is the enterprise and large business domain, where service providers across the world are introducing new advanced services to their business customers, scaling the number of orders processed, and increasing the complexity of service delivery.
In order to ensure profitability for the services provided to those corporate customers and to fight increasing competition, service providers need to maintain an optimized process for providing reliable network design based on available assets. Service providers also need to be lean enough to handle all the customer needs, as well as being capable of expanding to allow modular additional value added services that can be offered to the business customer.
Telecommunications/information technology service providers are required to maximize offerings for existing connectivity or available partnerships and to establish network and service design when offering a solution to a customer that will optimize other value added services (e.g. ICT, cloud services, and other services that exploit connectivity, etc.).
With newer and advanced technology lowering entry costs for new players, service providers have become heavily dependent on the right connectivity solution with very narrow margin for errors. To ensure competitiveness, minimizing design error is a key, as errors become costly throughout the enterprise network deployment.
Currently, communication service providers have to address various issues when designing services and networks for enterprise or large business customers. For example, network designers suffer from a lack of visibility into various inventory systems. Additionally, optimization of the network design is done manually today using incumbent tools, which are often inadequate for all connectivity needs associated with the target organization. Furthermore, network design requires highly skilled network design engineers and takes a long time, which results in a costly overall service and network design process.
While customers may know which services they are interested in, they will rarely have knowledge of the underlying connectivity needs and, in many cases, may be overwhelmed with the vast number of possibilities and different options available.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.